Philip R Ackman

Philip R. Ackman is a journalist and businessman who has worked for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, as well as reporting from the Middle East and the central Pacific. For several years he produced a current affairs radio program for the wife of Australia's then federal leader of the Opposition before producing a weekly Ackman Report networked into 17 radio stations along Australia’s east coast. Ackman also wrote a satirical column for a national computer magazine and, against all the odds, was named Australia’s Funniest IT Writer in the late 1990s. He has held a variety of mostly disastrous operational and executive roles for global vendors in the IT market. He has run a large distributor of computers and software in Australia, a consultancy developing strategy for IT vendors and a start-up in America, which got killed in the global financial crisis. While living in Asia, he started thinking about the relatively small cadre of world leaders who rule the world's populations. What was required, he wondered, to land such a job, where victory meant enormous power and possibly great wealth, but defeat meant consignment to obscurity, or, in many countries, loss of life or liberty.